Hiss, Chambers Memoirs Shed Light On Their Friendship And Falling Out

November 17, 1996|By New York Times

The death of Alger Hiss last week at the age of 92 was the last chapter in one of the nation's most bizarre and contentious espionage cases, one that led to the perjury conviction of Hiss in 1950 after a former Soviet agent, Whittaker Chambers, accused him of being a communist spy while working for the State Department in the 1930s. Hiss spent the rest of his life denying the charge.

More than a half-century later, dueling interpretations of the affair still color the national debate over the meaning of an era. But the Hiss-Chambers case is more than a battleground in a struggle for moral and historical high ground; it is also a story of a friendship turned sour, of a rising young government lawyer and a future Time magazine editor whose paths merged fatefully in the 1930s, then veered sharply apart.

Chambers, who died in 1961, discussed their relationship with an edgy wistfulness in his memoir, Witness (Random House, 1952). Hiss did the same, decidedly without nostalgic tint, in Recollections of a Life (Seaver Books, 1988). Here are excerpts.

Both men recall hitting it off when they met, though Chambers seems to have the fonder memories.

Chambers: With the arrival of my family in Baltimore, there began a development of a kind that is not favored in underground work. Alger Hiss became our personal friend in a way that made my relationship with him unlike any relationship with any others in the underground. . . .

Up until the very end, it was a friendship that existed on two incongruous levels. One was the level of conspiracy, which made my friendship with Hiss possible in the first place by throwing us together and holding us together for more than four years in the tight, exclusive secrecy of the underground. The second level seemed to have nothing to do with the first. It was the easy, gay, carefree association of two literate, very happy, fun-loving middle-class families. . . .

Hiss: In the political mannequin that Chambers now is, it is impossible for me to see the unkempt, struggling, freelance journalist I knew as George Crosley (an alias Chambers used as a Communist) from the days of despair and hope that marked the New Deal of the mid-1930s. He was one of a number of journalists, lecturers and students whom I met while serving as counsel to the Nye Committee, the Senate body that investigated the munitions industry. The committee staff was called on to assist all who requested information, especially journalists. . . .

Crosley and I lunched together in the Capitol a few times. His difficult financial situation aroused my sympathy, and I helped him out as best I could. . . . Little did I know that I was befriending a man without scruples or moral balance who would make use of my kindness to try to destroy me. . . .

His broken, neglected teeth, startling in so young a man, I attributed to the deprivations of his life. He was apparently self-taught. To me, he appeared to be a latter-day Jack London. I now think that I unconsciously identified Chambers with my brother Bosley, who had died eight years earlier at the age of 26.

Before long, however, some cracks appear in the friendship.

Hiss: Crosley spoke in a low tone with little inflection and no humor and was utterly self-involved. He was a monologist. Rather belatedly, I realized that Crosley's stories of his escapades and proletarian jobs were at best a mix of fact and fantasy. . . .

Crosley finally became something of a bother with his constant importuning for money.

When he telephoned me one day, I told him that I was convinced he would never pay the small amounts he owed me and that I saw no reason to continue the relationship. Years later, I learned that in the mid-1930s, when I knew him as Crosley, Chambers was a closet homosexual. I now believe that my rebuff to him wounded him in a way that I did not realize at the time. I think the rebuff, coupled with his political paranoia, inspired his later machinations against me.

Chambers: We knew one another's weaknesses and could laugh freely at them as something amusing because endearing.

For our friendship was almost entirely one of character and not of the mind. Despite his acknowledged ability in the legal field, which I was not competent to explore with him, Alger Hiss is not a highly mental man. Compared to the minds I had grown up with at Columbia, free-ranging, witty and deeply informed. . . . Alger was a little on the stuffy side. Ideas for their own sake did not interest him at all. His mind had come to rest in the doctrines of Marx and Lenin. . . .